THE GREY ANGEL

1. You, who loved so strongly,

It was you I saw, white, under the mountain,

You gave out the voice for beauty,

You tore away the dawn from the land.

How did it enchant me, this grey shape

Spread timelessly as a frontier land?

On this mountain, this unlit domain,

This face inhumanly fair.

Take it up with bridal embroidery,

With one thread blazing and firm,

This face that opens from under a veil,

Deep as the night, and night’s finger.

Yes, by the astounded gaze the shape seizes you:

From the shoulders fall off the grief and the laugh,

As the icy wind scatters and buries

The cherry blossom around your golden path.

2. You, you were always there,

You snowy voice, star of the grass!

Did you finally awake that tender sinner,

That heavenly shadow on a grey road for a nest?

Stand erect under that barrenness

With broad palms and entangled dreams.

Let the salty rock take you,

Breathless is the wild incurable land.

Look back from the dream, rest where you are not,

-You’ve never been longer than silence.

A height awaits you, eternal and dormant,

A bridge awaits you, of wonderful pain.

And from the top whence you mirror into water,

You can see a green rock, limpid and soft.

There tinkle inside it, golden lights sail,

Quiet worlds of unlike lives and flow.

You are that silken angel born out of rock,

With a slow armour of earthly bark.

An empty frame gapes at the brow like a pattern,

Looking for its gold seal lost in the wild.

Then, the golden rock rises, and touches

The eternal forehead, it takes away its voice.

And dreams ascend like a naked forest

The mild wings of the grey form.